Our primary writing goal this semester was to develop informative paragraphs with evidence and content vocabulary. Each essay needed a conclusion as well as a topic statement. Toward this end, students wrote four informative paragraphs, adding to the complexity of their paragraph structure as they learned and practiced new writing objectives. Students began with a review of nouns and verbs and then were encouraged in the use of adjectives to provide detail in their writing. Simple sentences were turned into compound sentences using conjunctions as students developed their writing craft.

Later in the semester, each student put together a booklet about grizzly bears. Initially, students worked in small groups to generate questions that would stir curiosity about grizzly bears.Why grizzly bears?

​We wanted to learn about grizzly bears after reading Moccasin Trail. ​The main character, Jim, survives a grizzly attack. We have been studying early settlers.

​ Working in their groups, students had one of three themes to represent; general descriptions and facts about grizzlies, what they eat, or how they raise their cubs. Each student illustrated their book and each group fashioned a diorama to depict some aspect of the information in their booklets. Students presented individual and group work at EXPO for parents and grandparents.

When we thin the new rows of kale and carrots, Maybelline gets a treat!

We learned about the pea family last week in gardening. This flower has a banner, a blade and a keel.

This week we are learning about cotyledons, monocots and dicots. We have an experiment going with bean and corn seeds. Mono means one and di means two.

In solar science we made a solar oven in a pizza box.

We are working hard to finish building the Calavera STEAM projects because we still have to write them up. Some students are finished with the critter book, and we will soon be putting our recommendations into practice.

In math we have been learning a few special multiplication facts...6x6, 8x8, and 3x4. We are primarily trying to gain an understanding of the connection between repeated addition and multiplication...the bigger picture of what the x symbol means. I hope you are working on the 3's and 4's at home. We need your help to master them. Play practice is the other significant piece of our weekly effort, but we have also been learning about contractions (fan boys) and prepositions. We have taken on new cursive letters like e and worked in spelling with consonant clusters and vowel pairs. In reading, one group has a lit circle with Rules, a book by Cynthia Lord. Other reading groups work with Brooke. We are all working on comprehension as well as fluency. We are also planning our class Christmas party/food drive. We drew Secret Santa names today.

This was a really fun math trail. We were working on rounding to the nearest ten last week. This morning we had a short lesson on rounding to the nearest 100 before setting out on the trail. Happy Halloween from the Brown Funny Bunnies.

We are working with our new Math Trail Map, "Take AwayTreasure Map." Each station has things to count, find the difference and move to the next station. When completed, all the differences are added together and then they subtract 2 to get the final total. Correct answers get you to the treasure.

In the process, the kids are outside in the dewy grass in the cool morning on Mondays, warming up for their week. On Tuesday mornings we are gardening. Last week we learned about earthworms and got our bin. The classes were very eager to handle and investigate the worms. Vikki Hutto is teaching the gardening class and so far we have been working with the Polar Bears.

Tuesday afternoon we had our first solar science class with Chris Martin. We created a scaled down model of the solar system, which started near the front gate, went across the driveway, and almost all the way down the hill.

Wednesday morning we collected rose petals and rosemary to put in the chickens' favorite egg laying box. It was beautiful while it lasted. All the ingredients are good for the chickens and ​improve their habitat.

We've been completing research in groups about parakeets,bunnies, goats and ducks, looking for ways to improve their diet and habitat. We've also been working with a list of spelling and vocabulary words each week that come from our weekly picture book read aloud. The students will be bringing the spelling listhome in order to have help learning to spell the words. Ourspelling week will generally go from Wednesday to Wednesday. Reading groups are working on fluency, accuracyand comprehension. We have been working with nouns andverbs, talking about schema we build from our experiences that we can reach into when we write, and reviewing complete andincomplete sentences. We are still reading Flora and Ulysses​and trying to learn more about squirrels. Our school internet hasbeen on the blink since Harvey, so we have run into greatdifficulty accessing the "All about Squirrels" videos we had hoped to watch." We really want to have our internet working again soon! Did you know a squirrel nest is called a dray?

Our cursive lessons have included i, t, and p. This week we will work on n. In geography we will begin making a lapbook. Our​first entry is about bodies of water. Tomorrow our gardening​class is all about soil. As usual, there is more to tell, but you can see we are busy bunnies.

We have 3 ducklings, 2 baby goats, a new parakeet mate for Lola, and a classroom/house rabbit. We will be learning a lot this semester about caring for our animal friends and how Great Humans take responsibility for living things that depend on us.

In our first week of school, we have decorated our science journals with adaptation photos....

and decorated our literacy notebooks with illuminated lettering of our first name initial.

We began our first read aloud, Flora and Ulysses. It has amazing vocabulary opportunities.

We've done 2 math trail adventures so far. Today the students were able to navigate the trail with a partner. Last week there were 153 eggs, but today only 20. What happened? ​answer: the Friday egg sale.

Each student wrote a letter of encouragement to themselves to place in their literacy notebook this week. This was a practice for the letter of encouragement they will write for the students of the coastal classroom we adopt. We will gather classroom supplies to send once we know what is needed in the classroom we get matched with. ​

We moved our 3 ducklings out to the farmyard today, but first we had to create an enclosure area for them around their new coop. The baby goats were both trying to help.

Our latest venture has been to survey our multiple intelligences and graph our unique profile. This information can help us understand our strengths and give us ideas for leveraging them to assist us in areas that are more challenging for us. We are talking about which of the intelligences we use most to succeed at the tasks we are undertaking. This is just the tip of it all, of course, because a lot more happened than can be covered in one posting. We are having fun, we are learning, we are enjoying each other, and new friendships are hatching in a peaceful environment...hallelujah.

Growing Native, our integrated learning theme for this school year is culminating in a Comanche Game for the Tiger class. Our village was burned down by the Utes, so we had to build new shelters. We relocated the village at the owl tree.

The morning we moved our village, the horses across the creek showed an interest in our efforts. Later that day they were back. They fit right into our role play. After building the village, the students mapped the area and included the Rancherios (the tree houses in the Eastern Woods) where the Comanches will go to trade or raid.

Our poetry month work culminated with a visit from Jim Parker. Jim worked with all our classes, inspiring the love of poetry as we responded to art and music. We had a great woodland poetry slam in the afternoon.

Other notable events were our field trip to the Meadows Center (where we explored a wetland and took a glass bottom boat excursion), Earth Day and May Day. On Earth Day, we serenaded the earth with song, planted two peach trees and tie dyed t-shirts. We had a May Day Market event on campus May 1st. Our class set up the Dandelion Cafe. We served dandelion brownies, cookies and dandelion tea, which we loving prepared.

We are now in the final days of the semester, putting finishing touches on Independent Study projects, rehearsing our play, and writing our Comanche stories. The days are flying past.

Time has been our math focus and now the Tigers can tell time. They are pretty excited about this new development! We have been learning our lines and creating the blocking for our Matinee play, "The Native Species Pet Shop." It emerged from our money math unit where we created a pet shop in our classroom. It also features our dandelion recipes, another theme from this semester.

April is poetry month and we have begun writing and listening to poems. We started with trees and moved on to native species animal subjects...(lots of snakes eating cakes and drinking milkshakes), but we will be working to exhibit our nature science knowledge as we become more comfortable with rhyming word patterns and families. April is also for April fools...here are a couple of ours.

The students have selected and read a short biography with a partner and are now writing book reports on their important person.

Much of our time is spent now on independent study projects. Many of the students have finished the research, and are on to the demo projects. ​

We've covered a lot of ground in math in the past few weeks. We worked for several weeks on multiplication and then started a money unit. Our big project this week was to create a pet shop. We took inventory, priced the pets, set up the store and grooming salon, bagged food, made leashes, feeder mice, and crickets and then had a chance to operate the store and give field trip tours to the other students at IOS. Here is a gallery of math photos.

We've continuted to work on the research aspect of our dessert projects. Each student needs 12 facts to proceed to the next step. We are almost all there after this week.

We have been learning about contractions in spelling. We have had fun performing surgery to remove letters, leaving band aids as apostrophes.

For several weeks we have been writing opinion essays about our favorite movies, giving four reasons you should go see it.

In science we contined our work with dandelions, measuring and comparing stems and using the roots to make dandelion root vinegar. We also planted lavender, documenting the starting height in our nature journal. We have continued to investigate photosynthesis and have expanded our discussion to include more information about the role plants play as producers in the food chain, becoming food for herbivores and omnivores who become food for carnivores.

As always, our primary and favorite investigation is during nature lit time. IOS Island is the newest, biggest, best thing in the woods right now.